Haunting Julia is an atypical but very effective little ghost play from the usually comedic Alan Ayckbourn. One of his most obscure too, given that it is receiving it's London premiere 17 years after it was first performed, but this production at wouldn't-know-it-was-there-unless-you're-looking-for-it Riverside Studios in Hammersmith is well worth a look.
The set strikes you first, a full length bedsit, contained in a studio space rather than a stage. The bedsit is where the titular Julia, a musical prodigy, lived and died, and her tortured father has converted it into a public shrine and tourist site. He now brings two other men into this seemingly haunted room, Andy, Julia's former boyfriend, and Ken, a medium who knows more than he lets on.
Haunting Julia is in that grand tradition of The Woman in Black and Sleuth of making the best of a small cast and one set to conjure up tension, both verbal and visual. As the father, Joe, Christopher Timothy, late of All Creatures Great and Small, is effectively hot-headed, and former Carry On irregular Richard O'Callaghan is a stand-out as the medium.
Apprehension rises slowly but surely - and the interval was a bit unneccessary - but events come to a fine exciting conclusion, with a bricked-up door promising to reveal something spooky every time it's opened and some effective Ghost Stories style effects making the spectre's presence felt as the meaning of the play's title becomes clear.
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